ARCHITECTURE VIEW

ARCHITECTURE VIEW; Giving New Life to Philadelphia's Skyline

By Paul Goldberger

Published: November 15, 1987

PHILADELPHIA—
THE WAY PEOPLE TALKED about One Liberty Place when plans for this skyscraper were announced a few years ago, you would have thought that this was not a new building but some sort of nuclear weapon. One Liberty Place would be the ruination of Philadelphia, cried the project's opponents, the sign that this somewhat genteel city had sold out to real-estate developers and become just like anyplace else.

It was not just that One Liberty Place would be the first building in Philadelphia's history to rise taller than the statue of William Penn atop City Hall, traditionally the sacrosanct limit beyond which no structure could go. It seemed to be adding insult to injury that the architect was Helmut Jahn of the Chicago firm of Murphy/Jahn, designer of some of the glitziest and most pretentious recent towers in Chicago and New York, for this only reinforced the sense that this building was going to symbolize the end of Philadelphia as it had always been.

One Liberty Place is now finished, and the startling thing is that it is not only far and away the best tall building Mr. Jahn has ever designed, it is the best tall building that has been built in Philadelphia in more than 50 years - surely the finest skyscraper this city has seen since 1932, when the epoch-making Philadelphia Saving Fund Society tower by Howe & Lescaze, perhaps the greatest International Style skyscraper in the United States, was finished. Helmut Jahn, after a decade of producing overachieving skyscrapers that were vastly better in concept than reality, has finally gotten it just right. The skyline of Philadelphia, far from being destroyed by One Liberty Place, is in fact given new life by this building. The skyline has been transformed from one of the flattest of any American city to one of the richest.

The building - which will eventually be the centerpiece of a complex including two smaller towers - is 61 stories high, and at 816 feet (921 feet including a spire) it rises substantially above the 491-foot height limit that had previously prevailed in Philadelphia. There can be no question, then, that this building is now the dominant element on the city's skyline. But One Liberty Place has a stunning presence that involves much more than height; this tower has exceptionally gracious proportions, and its shape strikes a remarkable balance between dignity and verve.

The tower, sheathed in a mix of granite, glass and metal, is roughly square in shape for most of its height, with its four corners cut away. Near the top, the square gives way to a series of four huge gables, which join to make a four-part pyramidal crown of glass. The tower resembles nothing so much as the Chrysler Building. While it is not so slender as Chrysler, and the precise design of its crown is quite different, it is clear from even the most casual glance that this design could not have come about had the Chrysler Building not been built first - that One Liberty Place is less a new kind of skyscraper than it is a homage, in up-to-the-minute materials, to the most beloved tower of the most exuberant period of the American skyscraper.

The desire to unite the traditional, romantic imagery of the skyscraper with the sleekness of modernism is not unique to this building. But rarely have the warmth of a romantic shape and the coolness of smooth materials been resolved into so harmonious a whole. Many buildings of this genre are trite, and glib; One Liberty Place is neither. It might be said that it is abstract enough to read as a Platonic kind of tower, yet figurative enough to seem right for this specific time and place. The tower fits comfortably on Market Street, the heart of the downtown business district, and its form weaves amiably into those of its less distinguished neighbors.

One Liberty Place is one of the few truly convincing monuments of romantic modernism. It is at least as good as Philip Johnson and John Burgee's Transco Tower in Houston - until now probably the best attempt to echo in glass the architectural rhythms that the 1920's had rendered in stone, and also a tower that is convincing enough as pure form to transcend the triteness of historical association. And like Transco Tower, One Liberty Place is not a one-liner; it bears repeated viewing. It is equally compelling from all kinds of vantage points around the city, from the initial view inside the car of a train upon approaching Philadelphia, from which the building presides rather graciously over the city, to the way it looks from Rittenhouse Square, four blocks away, poking up over other buildings with a benignity almost unheard of in so large a structure.

Not that this is a building of utter perfection. As in all of Helmut Jahn's buildings, there is still too much going on, too frantic a sequence of moldings and stripes and panels of this and panels of that, as if the architect had feared that a willingness to let any part of this building look like any other part would be taken as laziness. But it is not nearly so hyperactive as many of Mr. Jahn's recent buildings, like the frenetic Park Avenue Tower in Manhattan; here in Philadelphia, there is at least a highly restrained color palette, with everything falling into a relatively restrained range of gray, silver and metallic blue. There are no pink stripes here, and nothing fights too hard to take our eyes away from the handsomeness of the shape itself, the strength of which, in the end, is Mr. Jahn's greatest achievement.